Sunday, 20 April 2014

The Land Of Changes

THE LAND OF CHANGES

Ruth Pracy

Reviewed by Mark Lain

The second
part of Warlock reader Ruth Pracy’s
trilogy that started with the snowbound and slightly mystical The Floating City was published in Warlock #11. Set this time around in the
interim area that links the first part’s Winter with the final part’s Summer,
this adventure takes place in what is basically little more than a forest that
lurches violently between Spring and Autumn environments. This transformation
process is known as “The Changing” and the intro goes to great lengths to make
out how dangerous and unpleasant an experience getting caught up in the middle
of The Changing can be. In keeping with the first adventure’s opening spiel, it
also pompously sets the scene for what actually seems like quite an intriguing
descent into the unknown. Unfortunately, this second instalment is rather
weaker than the first (which was functional, but certainly no masterpiece) and
is probably one of the least interesting short subjects to be published in Warlock magazine overall.

Unusually for
FF, you are given the opportunity to carry over your (presumably victorious) character
from the first part, but this presents several issues. Firstly, do you assume
that you are fully healed following the rest period that the intro mentions and
that you qualify for the full complement of potions and provisions that the
rules tell you you have, or do you re-use your previous character in the exact condition
that he/she finished Part One? Following on from this quandary, this adventure
can be played using either FF or D&D systems. This is a nice idea as Warlock was keen to promote role-playing
in general in its later editions as opposed to just being a FF magazine as it
was in its early days, and this gives you options for how you wish to approach the
mechanics of your adventurer. On the downside, using D&D rules totally
precludes you from using your previous character and takes away any sense of continuity
between the first and second parts of the story, plus using D&D rules makes
the adventure less involving as there are some situations where only FF rule
users can gain or be penalised in stat terms making the FF approach feel more
nuanced than the D&D route (especially with Luck adjustments.) I suppose as
well that the usual problem of how to handle dying comes into play here – if you
die in Part Two do you go all the way back to the beginning of Part One again,
or do you just carry on from the start of TLoC
without having to go through a full re-tread to get back where you are? (I’d
imagine most would plump for the latter.)

A criticism
of Part One was its sometimes clumsy construction, and that is certainly the
case again here, even if this time around you are allowed to eat without
being instructed by the text (which is good as this means that you can actually
eat this time!):

·The
rules mention testing your Skill or Stamina, but nowhere in the text are you
required to do either of these (I can find 8 Luck test sections, but that’s it)

·The
true path (and most of the false ones) are all very short, meaning there are
several multi-paragraph episodes that could easily be cut down into one making
the adventure take up half as many sections whilst still being exactly the same

·There
are lots of typos and textual inconsistencies, including a shambolic opening
ramble that states “who knows where you came from”, then, er, promptly tells
you exactly where you came from

·It’s
probably a proof-reading problem (and Warlock
certainly had plenty of these!), but the punctuation in this adventure is insane,
with rogue commas in particular turning up all over the place, making it read
very awkwardly and disjointedly – an adventure should be fast-moving and vivid
to draw you in, not such a grammatical mess that you spend as much time trying
to understand the sentences as you do trying to feel like this is happening to
you

·Due
to the messy structure and lack of play-testing, there is an additional (and I
suspect quite important) alternate (“failure”) ending (paragraph 72) that you
cannot reach as it has no linking section, but does result in you finishing up
in the Summer lands, which is where you are trying to get to

The flip-side
of the Pracy-esque cons is the nicer touches that she also always includes in
her adventures:

·You
need to gain allies and behave yourself even more in this adventure than in
Part One, and the psychotic approach is very much discouraged in favour of
using some intelligence to negotiate the key moments and choose your moves
wisely

·The
true path is not as easy to find this time around (and there is only one as far
as I can tell), even if it is disappointingly brief when you do finally figure
it out

·You
need several items again this time and they can be quite tricky to get hold of
(until you figure out how to ingratiate yourself with the locals)

·The
interesting feature of “non-win” endings is used again here where you achieve a
“victory” of sorts but not the desired outcome, which does encourage you to try
to find the optimum ending, although several of these are rather obscurely
sign-posted and you will have to make some 50/50 calls that will lead to either
victory or failure without you really understanding why

·A
particularly neat inclusion is that you can acquire a horn that allows you to
escape instantly from the entire forest in various moments of peril. OK, it’s
just another way to get to more “non-win, but alive” endings, but it’s an
interesting concept

Whilst your
actual mission is simply to safely reach your homeland (Summer), the real point
of this instalment is to meet a Moss Maiden who gives you your mission for Part
Three and tells you that you are the chosen one who has to find the fabled Lost
Land. You have to prove that you are the person she seeks and you do this by generally
behaving yourself and making a couple of correct key choices at the right testing
moments as mentioned above. In adventuring terms though, this means that
nothing much happens on the true path other than you accepting the mission for
Part Three and this adventure is basically just a fairly mundane bridge between
The Floating City and In Search Of The Lost Land. Even the
much-advertised “Changing” only happens on the incorrect routes and, whilst it
is disorientating and its description does make you feel as sick as your
character is meant to feel, it’s a bit of a let-down that you aren’t actually meant
to witness it, even if the opening section’s warning is probably intended to
alert you to the fact that the true path avoids it.

Similarly, of
the always imaginative (and unpronounceable) unique encounters included here
(and these are a big plus of RP’s FFs), two can only be found by going the
wrong way (the very tough windy beast called a Mazzamarieddu, and the Fechan),
whilst the true path is dominated by the Moss Maiden and a group of mischievous
but actually very helpful dwarf spin-offs called Brownies (and their evil cousin,
the Redcap, which is described as horrific but just looks cute in its picture.)
There is also a potentially intriguing encounter with the Gwyllion late on, which provides another challenge, but you might just be starting to get fed up of this adventure's mental tests by this time.

Other than
the tough battle with the Mazzamarieddu (which you might as well try to lose as
you’ve already lost the game if you’ve met it anyway), the main challenge in
this adventure is to make the correct non-kill choices and find the ultimate
ending by using your intelligence rather than your sword-arm. There are two
excessively harsh moments, one involving an aging curse where you lose 3 Skill
and 6 Stamina permanently, the other being a pillar with a choice of four runes
where three will lead to instant deaths (including the one you seem to have
been told is the right one), but otherwise most of the failures are through
finding a survival ending other than the one on paragraph 200, which is a
refreshing change for FF even if there are rather a lot of non-win outcomes in
this adventure.

As was
generally the case with later Warlock
mini-adventures, the magazine’s cover image is nothing to do with what is going
on here, but Pete Martin’s art within the adventure itself is really good,
being full-framed, atmospheric and very highly-detailed, which is especially
helpful as the encounters here are mostly unique to this adventure. The key
items you need make up the bulk of the incidental between-text smaller images,
but this adds flavour and gives you useful hints for when you have failed
umpteen times and are trying to work out exactly what you need to find to beat
this mission. I am pleased to say that Pracy’s text is less curt this time
around, there is much more dialogue (especially with the Moss Maiden), and you
do not feel quite so insulted when you make a bad choice.

Despite
having some nice touches (especially the art, the need to use your brain, and a
sense of environmentalism), there is so little actually going on here that it
does make this a rather empty experience if played in isolation. As an
interlude between the other two parts of the story it works fine, but it is
just too short on substance to be considered an adventure in its own right. If The Floating City captured your
imagination, then it’s worth carrying on with the story, but this just does not
stand up on its own.